"Past Lives" and the grief of everyday choice

in which he attempts to write on "culture"

I’m a little late to the party, but I finally saw “Past Lives” this weekend. What I want to write here is a set of Thoughts that is in no way a “complete” analysis of the film, and is something that probably will miss a number of important themes. “Every reader reads a different Ulysses” and all that.

The story itself isn’t particularly innovative—Nora (formerly Na Young) had a crush on Hae Sung when they were both young grade schoolers. The two go on one date, chaperoned by their mothers, but are separated when Nora and her family emigrate to Canada so that Nora can pursue a writing career. 12 years later, on a call with her mother, she looks up Hae Sung as a joke, finds him on Facebook, proceeds to establish what feels much like a long-distance relationship with him before deciding to focus on her writing. 

At a writer’s retreat, Nora meets the man she will eventually marry, introducing him to the concept of “In Yun” on which the film is based, and Hae Sung finds a girlfriend on his trip to China. Another 12 years later, Hae Sung finally makes his way to New York City. He and Nora are reunited, but it’s too late for them to choose one another: they have already chosen to lead different, incompatible lives. 

In the film’s final scene, Nora and Hae Sung wait two minutes together for Hae Sung’s Uber to arrive. We watch tension build between them for a scene that burns at a snail’s pace. Movie scenes don’t usually hold tension for so long, but A24 seems to like this style. I’m reminded of a scene in “The Green Knight” where we watch Dev Patel atop a horse for minutes before he is accosted by another character.

Those few minutes are uncomfortable, but very predictable. The pair gradually turn towards each other, saying nothing. All the ingredients that would precede a kiss in your ordinary romantic film fall into place. And, of course, the Uber arrives just at the moment you’re sure the string is about to snap. We watch an embrace instead.

What interests me is what follows Hae Sung’s departure. Nora walks back to her apartment where her husband waits on the steps; he likely expects her to break down into tears, and she does.

But her face is obscured by a shadow. / We can’t see her tears. / She buries her face in his shoulder. / We can’t observe her pain. / She turns away from us to walk inside. / We can’t see her face.

There is a deep, heavy pain here: the pain of an unrealized life that only finds articulation in Hae Sung’s what-ifs. But the tragedy is both extraordinary and mundane. How amazing it is for two people, so separated by distance, to re-connect over decades and maintain a feeling that first struck them as young children. 

We can see, over the course of their re-connections, Nora and Hae Sung gradually acquiring determinacy in their divergent paths. As children, the two go on a date. While Nora’s parents have plans, she is not yet “fully” committed to any particular life: she aspires to win a Nobel Prize in Literature already, but the winds of fate could knock her in any number of directions. 

As young adults, when Nora and Hae Sung reconnect over Skype, the two have further solidified career plans. Nora is continuing to pursue serious study in writing, while Hae Sung does his military service and studies engineering. But a possibility still lingers. When will Hae Sung visit America? While Nora and Hae Sung conquered a separation in time, the two are still separated by space. 

It is when Nora, with her writer’s retreat impending, decides to fully commit to her path, that she realizes Hae Sung will remain pixels on a screen and a distraction from the real world in front of her. She could have held onto the hope that the two could make it work, that an in-person meeting a year away might be worth the wait, but she chose to trade possibility for actuality. 

While Nora feels comfortable with her decisions until the end, the what-ifs expressed by the two men in her life keep alive the notion of something else. Nora’s husband and Hae Sung are caught up in opposing potentials: Nora’s husband displays a generalized anxiety about his potential replacement with anyone (Nora could have met someone else at her writer’s retreat), while Hae Sung articulates the particular possibility of his and Nora’s relationship and his actual replacement in her life by a particular man. 

It feels almost as if Nora is the only one with agency in making concrete decisions: Hae Sung’s future feels so linear as to have been fully determined. The only what-if for Hae Sung is the possibility of a life with Nora—the rest of his life barely registers as the product of active choices. Though this has been said enough times, it is worth repeating: Hae Sung’s seeming passivity, the non-choice to somnambulate into a “traditional Korean” life, is just as much a choice as Nora’s active decision to chart an alternate path. 

So the impossibility of a life together boils down to nothing more than the life choices Nora and Hae Sung made: Hae Sung stayed in Korea to live a “normal” life and take a “normal” job, while Nora chased the American Dream into the arms of another man. Whatever exists between the two ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, a cry protected by shadow.

In the process of making decisions, of committing to things, we lose out on possibilities. These absences—unrealized dreams or loves or paths not taken—can disclose themselves as pain. Just as Nora’s tears are obscured from our view (but not her husband’s), the collection of pains each of us carries with us is something invisible to the world. Every choice demands something, and the heavier decisions can compose for us a symphony of torment.

The large and small decisions Nora and Hae Sung made—each to live their particular lives—diverge most strikingly in their expressions of particular ways of life. Nora is very conscious that she has left Korea-proper behind and become a Korean-American, a woman who has crossed oceans in pursuit of the American Dream. 

Nora’s American Dream feels unattained in the grandiose sense: we see no path to a Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer, or a Tony for Nora. She lives in a modest apartment with her husband. She looks just slightly ragged, worn by the demands of her city and occupation. We are left to wonder how Nora’s parents would feel about her station in life. We are told her husband meets them, but we never see what happens. Would they feel their sacrifice was worth it? 

I contrast this with my own experience of the American Dream—my parents emigrated from Pakistan because they wanted a better life for themselves and their children. While my father could have had a successful career and established a comfortable life for his family, his moral compass directed him away from a failed state where, in his estimation, nepotism and dishonesty were part and parcel of daily life. 

And so I had opportunities they didn’t: as an American citizen I grew up in an environment where I could take advantage of a more holistic education and develop a different sense of self. My father’s refusal of the Pakistani medical field was not the same sort of sacrifice that Nora’s parents made. But he did deal with precarity, with the racism of his first bosses, with the challenging novelty of a new place. He works much harder than he might have, had he stayed in Pakistan. 

For Nora, there is an illustration of the American Dream in other ways (some of them more mundane). What could be as American as a writer living in New York City (a barista / “actor” in Los Angeles, perhaps?)? Nora and her husband’s life is far from glamorous, but they are working hard to “make it” and establish themselves. Hae Sung takes the “safe” route; he makes Nora feel both more and less Korean because of how different they are, because of his traditional Korean masculinity. “He’s so Korean.”

Nora’s exercising of her freedom of choice—to become a writer, to marry a white man—constitutes an “American” life in a nation that wants to epitomize happiness and free choice but seems to struggle in its articulation of a positive, definite articulation of just what happiness is.

I reflect also on the macro- and micro- aspects of the American Dream in my own life. I think I’ve done a lot of the traditional things: I’ve gotten a degree at a pretty good college and work a good job; I live comfortably and make enough to support myself and spend on things. I didn’t sleepwalk into my current life, but I didn’t consciously reject many traditional notions of success in the way Nora did. 

And yet, while I haven’t become a writer or philosopher but spend a great deal of time engaged in the two disciplines, I, too, experience a determinate life in which I have made particular choices about who to be. At the risk of being the Infinite Jest guy, it seems worth recalling Marathe’s freedom-from versus freedom-to: that a negative freedom, an amorphous life, is minimally coherent but not a proper notion. Freedom-to—a freedom which does not necessarily mean unlimited choice—enables simply acting on our values without the tyranny of what-if.

If the American Dream, in its best form, involves the free choice to be a certain person, then perhaps both Nora and Hae Sung have achieved it. Nora, despite her grief at the end of the movie, feels committed and at peace with her decisions about what life to live and who to live it with. While Hae Sung may be less at peace about his love life, he has also committed himself to a particular life. 

I cannot say as much here with certainty—we do not know whether an alternate life like Nora’s even presented itself as a possible choice for Hae Sung, though parts of the movie could justify the claim that there was only one possible life for him. He doesn’t feel jealous of Nora’s life, even if he might be jealous of Nora’s husband. 

“Past Lives” might foreground an unfulfilled love, but it also offers a positive vision of what it is to choose something, to follow a path in life and to experience an incompatibility with someone who chose something different. Reviews of this film that I haven’t (yet) read call it a story of “love and chance”—chance is indeed involved, but so is choice.

A grand “American Dream” in the traditional sense seems an unspoken barrier that separates the lives Nora and Hae Sung lead, but we can also read the film as dramatizing the forms of situatedness we each experience as the product of prosaic decisions. Just as we choose things in life that will lead us towards and away from people, so can we, somehow, choose how to experience the grief of things lost and doors unopened.

—big thanks to

Jasmine Sun

Ivan Zhao

&

Varun Joshi

for reading the first version of this drivel and for feedback that I used to make it slightly less terrible

words chosen

Catastrophic blues
Movin' on was always easy for me to do
It hits different
It hits different 'cause it's you

~ from midnights

consumption

• Zenith’s biography of Pessoa (so good!) + “Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act” guess I’m on a Pessoa kick again whoops

• also (simultaneously w/ above) I have made it around to reading After Virtue so the biography reading is going rather slowly but will probably speed up soon

• I listened to the Busoni Piano Concerto a few times over the past few weeks and lose my mind a little bit each time I listen the beginning is so Brahms-y it’s 75 minutes long I feel like I need a break after listening to it

  • also in no way related the Tchaikovsky Competition has been going on

• “The Weight of Forever”

• “The Empirical Triumph of Theory” this just extended my reading list by at least 6 papers

• “Why AI Will Save the World” this does have some good parts to it

• “Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality” other papers too this one was pretty neat though

• “The Seductions of ‘Ulysses’” it was bloomsday ok what else was i going to do not read this

• “The Case Against Travel” this was divisive… apparently Agnes Callard is also on a Pessoa kick?

• It’s not perfect but this interactive map of the pantheism controversy is kinda fun

• this lecture by Tal Linzen saying LMs could learn semantics—to me, the idea that you can refer to something by intending to refer to it feels sus if not just circular. how does reference work? good question